The Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English (PVC) corpus

Period: 1990s

Interview details: 18 interviews. Total word count = 208,295. Total audio length = 17 hours 34 minutes 25 seconds.

The PVC project team: Gerry Docherty, Paul Foulkes, Jim Milroy, Lesley Milroy, Penny Oxley, David Walshaw and Dominic Watt.

Like the Tyneside Linguistic Survey of the 1960s and 1970s, the Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken English project was a study of local accent features. The PVC project team collected 18 interviews in Newcastle, recorded around 1994, which consist of conversations between two friends or relatives of similar age and social background.

As well as speaker sex, age, residence, education and occupation, Table 2 below records the socio-economic group to which each informant was assigned. These classifications were made on the basis of a broadly defined notion of social class that was determined by place of residence within Newcastle.

One of the informants is recorded in two separate interviews (decten1pvc06 and decten1pvc08). In decten1pvc06, she is recorded with her brother, while in decten1pvc08 she is talking with a female friend. It is apparent that some of the other informants from different interviews also know each other.

The informants were free to discuss any topic that they chose. Unlike the TLS interviews, the PVC interviewer plays little or no part in most of the interviews, though she does occasionally ask questions or suggest new topics when the conversation dries up (e.g. decten1pvc01 and decten1pvc06) or when one of the informants has to leave early (decten1pvc17). The interviewer also seems to play a slightly more active part in the two recordings that involve married couples (decten1pvc04 and decten1pvc05).

As in the TLS, the project's focus on features of accent is reflected in the word list that most of the informants are asked to read out at the end of the interviews. Only selective phonetic transcriptions of words of interest were produced at the time of the project.

The recordings were made on digital audio tape and average around 60 minutes in length. Most of the interviews take place in informants' homes, though at least four of them (decten1pvc15, decten1pvc16, decten1pvc17 and decten1pvc18) were evidently recorded at Rutherford School, in Fenham, Newcastle (just before it was renamed Westgate Community College). The first three of these involve pairs of students, and the last one records a pair of dinner ladies.

The PVC team's primary research aim, as the title of the project suggests, was to examine patterns of phonological variation and change in contemporary spoken British English. The methodology of this study and some results from it can be found in Milroy et al. (1997), Docherty & Foulkes (1999) and Watt & Milroy (1999).

Table 1 summarizes the PVC component of DECTE.

Each interview has two primary informants. These are listed in Table 2 as a and b together with associated social data.

The age and speaker sex information in Table 2 is summarized in Table 3.

In 1998, Karen Corrigan of the School of English Literary and Linguistic Studies at Newcastle University used the TLS and PVC materials for a real-time sociolinguistic study.

The data controllers of the PVC project were approached for permission to use their recordings, and they donated the 18 audio tapes to the Catherine Cookson Archive for this purpose. The first orthographic transcriptions of the PVC corpus were made during this study.

In 2001-2005 these PVC materials were incorporated into the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE).